Liaison Review

There’s a cool idea at the center of the new AppleTV+ international spy thriller Liaison: two Syrian hackers discover information that could destroy an evil corporation with deep international governmental ties and desperately need the help of European spy associations to get them to safety. Luckily for them, two of the people on the case – Alison Rowdy (Eva Green) and Gabriel Delage (Vincent Cassel) – have a unique set of skills (and access to various British and French intelligence – respectively) to allow them a chance of getting the hackers to safety and stopping the impending attacks on Europe from the evil corporation.

But here’s the problem: where the series should feel like a taut, compelling spy thriller, it manages to only occasionally get our adrenaline up while wasting two stellar performances from its leads Green and Cassel. A lot of the issues with the series stem from its rather convoluted plot – something that isn’t helped by the series’ six-episode run time, which feels about three episodes too long. Should Liaison have been a film? Probably. Especially considering the series isn’t all that concerned with taking the time to flesh out any of the characters – even Alison and Gabriel – beyond mostly perfunctory good guy/bad guy/morally gray guy breakdowns. The central arc – the attempt to get the hackers out of harm’s way in a bid to stop the evil corporation from enacting its treacherous plan – works just fine. It just takes far too long to see it to its inevitable conclusion, while spending far too much time with secondary characters who are, frankly, boring (a universal theme, whether they are white hat, black hat, or somewhere in between). The only characters who pop are Alison and Gabriel, and that’s thanks largely to Green and Cassel making a meal out of very little.

I don’t think I can stress enough just how much Green and Cassel do to keep the series chugging along. If you aren’t familiar with either, I highly recommend giving Penny Dreadful (a Showtime series that proved just how insanely talented Green is – although it did so by increasingly asking her to deal with more and more complex and emotionally taxing plots) or Black Swan (which gave Cassel the opportunity to lean into his uncanny ability to present as both charming and potentially threatening). But here, Green and Cassel are far and away the reason to keep watching the series as it starts to falter. Once Alison and Gabriel are working together – or at least in each other’s immediate orbit – the series starts to find some level footing. But, as soon as the story shifts away from either, things start to fall apart again. The writing, weak throughout and missing any real zip, whether it’s in English, French, or Arabic, spends a great deal of time going in circles. There’s a clear pattern to the action in the series: update on the status of the Syrian hackers, a hacking attack on a country is discovered, Gabriel and Alison get a step closer to solving the case while the forces around them work to stop them, repeat. Again, this story could have been easily streamlined into an action thriller of a film with some cuts to the repetitive plot along the way.

That being said, when we are focused on Alison and Gabriel – and especially when they are together – the series works. You can look past some of the less compelling elements of the narrative, some of the less compelling performances (there are a couple of shockingly stiff performances which struck me as odd, considering the resumes of the cast as a whole), and the story that feels pretty rote at this point (trust me, there’s not a surprise to be had in the overall arc of the series), and focus on the work of Green (who I always forget is actually French and not British, as her accent is always so on point) and Cassel, there are certainly worse ways to spend six hours. But, as with many recent AppleTV+ series, this is one that needed some additional work to ensure it was worthy of its place on the streaming service – and worthy of the work of its two great leading actors.

Liason premieres on AppleTV+ on Friday, February 24. All six episodes were provided for review.